Another Country, Another Life: Calumny, Love, and the Secrets of Isaac Jelfs

Author

1

Escape from New York

Was there no other way?

An anxious thirty-five-year-old lawyer from one of Broadway Avenue’s biggest firms gazed at the scene around him.

Not even the cooler air of early autumn had been able to refresh New York’s acrid skies or dilute the stench rising from the city’s filthy streets, open sewers, and spewing smokestacks. The whole jammed-up place reeked like a fetid cauldron.

Even so, he still felt the city’s tug. It was here he’d found chances to get ahead. He was enthralled by the exotic mixture of peoples, the pulsating rhythms of the place as ships arrived, buildings rose, and crowds jammed through streets chasing trade and entertainment. New York was a civilized jungle. Here he’d been able to turn dreams into realities.

He let out a slow heavy sigh, then turned and entered the station. He knew there was no other choice.

Boarding the train with him early that September morning in 1869 was a pregnant woman, their little girl, a curly-haired youth, and another woman in her early twenties. Other passengers would never have guessed that this family, dressed almost in Sunday best, was heading for Canada’s wilderness to hack out a home from dense forest. Yet, such was their intent. Nor were they alone in this quixotic quest.

If New York had become a magnet drawing hopeful souls and ragged

refugees from all corners of the world, Muskoka District was the newest, best refuge for anyone needing a further escape or yet another fresh start. In the United States, the Republican Party had come to office in 1860 under President Abraham Lincoln with a pledge of free land for homesteaders willing to open the west, and Ontario’s new government had implemented just the year before, in 1868, an identical policy. Some of those now flocking north were refugees from war, flood, fire, or famine. Others sought sanctuary from family tragedy, a crisis of love, a debt of money, or to escape the arm of the law.

Even as this New York family’s early morning train steamed north toward Canada, Captain Pokorny, a furtive Polish immigrant whose rank was said to derive from prior service in the army of his homeland, was another of those unlikely pioneers seeking refuge in the remote northland. A trusted treasurer of Toronto’s opera company, he’d fetched the Saturday night receipts from the theatre to count the haul, keep it safe through Sunday, then deposit the money Monday at the bank. Instead, he vanished, escaping to Muskoka’s deepest bush in Franklin Township, an all but inaccessible section not yet surveyed, not even open for settlement. The edgy Pole found unpromising rocky land at the furthest end of Peninsula Lake for his out-of-the-way farm, a place not to grow crops but escape the law. Pokorny would survive, as a squatter, aided by his wits and a suitcase crammed with cash.

Other desperate individuals heading to Muskoka were not eluding the law but forgetting tragedy. After Henry Bird trained as a milliner at his father’s wool-weaving factories in England, he came to Canada, and before long was operating his own mill on the Conestoga River near Guelph, at least until the entire operation was flooded out by great rises in the river. The following year, severe flooding destroyed his rebuilt mill a second time. Then Bird’s wife, Sarah, their three-year-old daughter, and six-month-old son were all killed in an accident. Devastated, Henry Bird abandoned both God and Guelph and headed to Muskoka. By the early 1870s, he would be operating a new mill at the Bracebridge waterfall.

Whether fleeing to Muskoka for reasons criminal or honourable, whether drawn by opportunism or just a sense of adventure, everyone migrating into the bush was on a quest for some kind of new life.

In time Muskoka would become accessible from all directions thanks to convenient transportation and contemporary communications; but in the 1860s the district was not even the end of the line, it was beyond the end. Loggers only reached Muskoka’s southern edge by the late 1850s. Prospectors hadn’t yet discovered Ontario’s treasure chest of minerals in the northern districts beyond; until they did, no mining towns operated up there so there was no need for railways through Muskoka to haul resources south. By the mid-1860s, a couple of primitive colonization roads were being stubbornly pushed into Muskoka’s unknown terrain, one from the east, another, the south. Only in the mid-1870s would a railway line get as far as Gravenhurst, but then not advance any farther north for another decade. When this family from New York headed to Muskoka in 1869, this frontier district was the remotest place on anybody’s horizon.

New arrivals wanting anonymity for themselves asked few questions of others. They just hoped to cross over from one life to the next, a secular redemption, an unhallowed resurrection, entering a better world without having to die first.

Though people were propelled by urgent need to leave troubles behind, at the same time they found themselves pulled north by the bright prospect of becoming prosperous landowners. This alluring vision of being resurrected as self-sufficient individuals living on good farms of their own was even drawing people with no farming experience whatsoever, to land that was not yet settled, nor even cleared of its tangled forests.

These settlers hoped to cash in on a promise Ontario’s government and its immigration agents were aggressively promoting through speeches, advertisements in American and British newspapers, and the booklet Emigration to Canada: The Province of Ontario, distributed widely in 1869 to publicize Muskoka’s glowing agricultural prospects for new settlers. Whatever gloom haunted their pasts, these pioneers positively glowed as they imagined their hundred acres of free land. The Muskoka dream was grounded in the belief that having one’s own farm was the foundation of society and personal self-sufficiency; it promised continuation of a centuries-old pastoral way of life, one not yet dislodged by heavy industry, the growth of factories, and the magnet of living in cities.

Few individuals heading north to Muskoka sought a transformation more complete, however, than this desperate Broadway lawyer. In New York he boarded the train as Isaac Jelfs. In Toronto he stepped off as James Boyer.

Not only was Jelfs abandoning his name. He was forfeiting a long-craved legal career with the politically influential, if increasingly embattled, Broadway Avenue firm of Brown, Hall & Vanderpoel. He was relinquishing his recording secretary’s role with the Episcopalian Methodist Church in Brooklyn. He was abandoning the vice-presidency of the Brooklyn Britannia Benevolent Association, an office to which he’d been glowingly elected in May that year, being presented with a copy of Byron’s poetical works and making, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, one of his happy speeches on the occasion.

The real kicker was that he had closed the front door of the Jelfs’s 18th Street family home in Brooklyn for the last time. Overnight, Isaac vanished from the life of his wife, Eliza, and their young daughter, Elizabeth.

The pregnant person on the train was not Isaac’s wife in law, but had become a second wife in reality after she’d first captured his heart at a Britannia Benevolent Association dance one Saturday night several years before. The two-year-old girl on the train was their love child, Annie, whose birth the secretive lovers, Isaac Jelfs and Hannah Boyer, had contrived to leave unrecorded in New York’s registries. Equally absent from official documents was any record of their marriage, since neither in New York nor later in Canada would they ever have a legal wedding.

Jelfs had become embroiled in a risky double life, his two families living only blocks apart in Brooklyn’s Gowanus district. Beyond the snare of human complications inherent in such risky romance, his public role and professional reputation as a lawyer in breach of matrimonial laws escalated the danger. On top of that were his concerns about what might be going on at the law office. Some apparent practices at the fast-paced Brown, Hall & Vanderpoel firm made him fear a day of reckoning for corrupt practices might be in the offing. He’d already been swept up in something like that before, and paid a huge price despite never being a party to the wrong-doing.

The accumulating complications of his double life and the rising threat of what might happen at his embattled law firm, whose principal, Oakey Hall, was New York’s mayor and an integral part of the Tammany Hall political machine running the city and bilking its coffers, combined to produce a bold plan: Isaac Jelfs would completely disappear from the life of one family and abandon his career in New York, then reinvent himself in a new role with the other family somewhere else.

Yet, for neither James nor Hannah Boyer would this be the first time they found themselves starting life over in a new country.

2

On the Path of the Law

Isaac Jelfs was born May 28, 1834 (a detail James Boyer, with a much younger wife and also covering his tracks, would later obscure by giving 1836 as his year of birth), in Moreton-in-Marsh, an English farming centre in the northern Cotswolds west of Stratford.

Nestled along what centuries before had been a Roman roadway, Moreton-in-Marsh is aptly named, surrounded as it is by muck-rich acres. After 1227, when Moreton’s market charter was first granted, the town’s main event came every Tuesday, when the market hall and stone-cobbled thoroughfare filled with stalls of produce hauled by farmers from their fertile low-lying fields nearby.

When Isaac was a boy, a hundred-year-old tram railway ran the sixteen-mile distance between Stratford-upon-Avon and Moreton-in-Marsh, its pace gentle because the heavy freight cars were drawn by dray horses, its purpose chiefly to distribute coal that had first passed from the English coast on small sailing vessels up the Severn and Avon rivers to Stratford. On market days the railway’s tram car, fitted with a special covered top, carried passengers from Stratford out to Moreton — maids, perhaps an actor or two, buyers from the inns and taverns, fun-seeking visitors to the theatre town who’d come for evening playhouse performances — to get the farmers’ fresh produce straight from the fields that morning. A festive market day mood filled the Tuesday morning air and young Isaac Jelfs thrilled to it all, the dramatic highlight of his quiet week when he could enjoy action and observe strangers.

When Isaac Jelfs grew up in Moreton-in-Marsh, sheep moved unhurriedly through High Street’s market square, except on Tuesdays, the day when farmers filled the place with market-day stalls and he enjoyed the excitement.

(Watercolour print: Sylvester Stannart)

Between market days, and between the two fair days in March and November each year when Cotswold games of woolsack races, shin-kicking, and the oddity of downhill cheese-rolling contests attracted lively sport and loud cheering, the town of a thousand inhabitants was serene. Sleeping cats sunned themselves in the middle of the streets, a curving array consisting of High Street where the Jelfs lived, Oxford and Church streets, Bourton and Stow lanes, Bakers Row and Back Ends, together with rear lanes and narrow burgage plots held on yearly rents. Most buildings in picturesque Moreton were warm-coloured limestone or white stucco, with thick, thatched roofs and large chimneys. The burning tang of coal smoke drifted over the town and pinched Isaac’s nostrils. Each night he heard the town bell ring out from the sixteenth-century curfew tower just along the street at the corner of Oxford, a warning reminder to townsfolk of the risk of fire at night.

Isaac knew these houses and winding streets of Moreton-in-Marsh, all little changed when his great-grandson took this photograph in 1982.

Isaac Jelfs heard the bell from Moreton’s curfew tower at right. He would still recognize these enduring buildings along his street, except for the puzzling television antennae and gas station, which appeared a century after he left the village.

(Copyright of the Francis Frith Collection)

Moreton was not only a market centre for farmers but a travellers’ town, too, boasting several pubs, inns, hotels, teashops, and a coaching station. From one century to the next, despite advent of the linen production central to the Jelfs’s way of life, or the shift from horse-drawn coaches to steam-engine trains when Isaac was in his teens, little else about Moreton-in-Marsh seemed to change. Lord Redesdale, for whom the market hall was named, was officially lord of the manor; however, though he occasionally held what was known as a court baron, mostly to appoint constables, effective local government here as elsewhere across England was principally in the hands of the county’s magistrate, in whose office a heavy clock ticked away the hours even as time stood still.

The Jelfs household was headed by Isaac Senior, born in 1797 at the village of Bretforton. Isaac later relocated to Moreton-in-Marsh where, in 1824, he met and married Hannah Heath. The Jelfs family was set apart from others in that it prospered neither by farming nor through the hospitality trade, but to the extent Isaac Senior wove linens and Hannah made hats. The only manufactory here is that for linen cloth, reported Pigot’s 1844 Gloucestershire Directory on the economy of Moreton-in-Marsh. In spinning yarn for this cloth, Pigot’s added, some of the poorer classes are employed, without bothering to add that such workers were poor because they could earn only a pittance in this hard-bargain economy.

Reflecting his own steady rise in the business, Isaac Senior identified himself to the census-takers in 1841 as a weaver, a decade later as a linen manufacturer. His was the same initiative displayed by other enterprising Jelfs in the region, looking to see what people needed and then supplying it. Thirty miles north in Birmingham, Isaac’s cousins likewise owned and operated small undertakings: John Jelfs was a shoemaker at 111 Holt Street; William Jelfs owned a bakery at 154 Unett Street; while James Jelfs was keeper of an eating house at 7 Lower Priory.

Ancestors of the Jelfs had migrated to England from continental Europe, most likely the Low Countries, in the late 1500s. There the name Jelfs, with various spellings, appears in records back into the thirteenth century. Although the family was Jewish, for several generations now the Jelfs had become adherents to the Church of England, the family and its descendants assimilating into English society, as such names as John, William, and James attest, although the girls still seemed to get more traditional Jewish surnames. In England, the Jelfs had morphed into Anglos in the manner of many other Jews, in order to get ahead in their new surroundings. The redoubtable British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose clearly Jewish name never disguised his heritage, was a leading example of this phenomenon of social integration of which the earlier Jelfs were but a part.

From the 1600s onwards in England, Jelfs families had been concentrated northwest of Moreton in the Evesham and Badsey area, living in such Worcestershire villages as Honeybourne and Bretforton, down through generations. Many Jelfs marriages embraced other ethnic and national backgrounds. Over time memories faded until family heritage became fogged over with ignorance. Contacted in connection with the writing of this book, the Jelfs living in today’s polyglot Britain, devoted to such diverse endeavours as pottery making, professional soccer, and politics, were as surprised as the delighted descendants of James Boyer living in twenty-first century Canada to discover their remote Jewish genes.

Back in the 1700s, a Jelfs family had lived at Moreton-in-Marsh, but then moved away. By the mid-1800s, the only Jelfs in town were Isaac, his wife Hannah, and their various children. The Jelfs’s household shared High Street with many elegant eighteenth-century inns, houses, and the distinctive Victorian era Tudor-style Redesdale Market Hall.

Of the eight known children, three were boys, with Isaac the middle one. The first-born child was Samuel; nine years older than Isaac, he served as a fine example to the others for the independence which Isaac Senior and his wife Hannah required of their offspring. Sam had already moved out of the house when Isaac Junior was still quite young, to live with a retired couple named Lardiner. He became organist at Moreton’s Anglican St. David parish church by age fifteen, married a Harriet from nearby Chipping Campden when twenty-two, then moved on to Dorset to work as a solicitor’s general clerk, advancing in time, by then himself the father of seven children, to become clerk of the Poor Law Union.

Meanwhile Isaac’s older sisters, Miriam and Sabrina, stayed at home, learning the skills of hat-making from their mother. Sabrina died from typhus at age seventeen. Other children died, too. Hannah gave birth to a boy in 1832, baptized Isaac to carry on his father’s name, who perished within the year. Lest that be taken as a bad omen, the Jelfs tried out the same name on their next male infant who was baptized June 10, 1834 at St. David’s as Isaac Jelfs. Because this child lived, the name would be perpetuated — at least for thirty-five years until Isaac’s disappearing act into Canada in 1869.

Just two weeks before Isaac was born, another child arrived under the family roof. Baptized George Jelfs on May 25, 1834 at the same local parish church, he was the child of Jane Jelfs, a single woman from Evesham who was secreted with her in-laws while she came to term in tandem with Hannah.

When Isaac was four, another child, named Rebecca, was born into the household. Although this little girl was found by the census-takers in 1841 living with her parents, that is the last trace of her, with no record of Rebecca Jelfs ever dying. Another girl, Mary Ann, born in 1840, died suddenly from natural causes at age eleven. Isaac was eleven by the time his younger brother, Thomas, arrived in 1845. Amidst this shifting galaxy of siblings, Elizabeth Heath, some thirteen years older than Isaac and more like a sister than an aunt, moved in to help Hannah with the children and household, thus freeing up her sister’s time to increase production of straw bonnets. If the boy learned anything from all these comings and goings, it was that family was a very loose arrangement.

Young Isaac was bright and healthy, though somewhat shy. His boyhood adventures were innocent, limited by place. Filling the quiet interludes between market days, he sometimes hiked with other boys into the countryside, past water meadows and beech woods, across fast-flowing streams, through high turf alive with grasshoppers.

For a special adventure, the children walked a couple miles along the old Roman turnpike to the Four Shires Stone, nestled on a square yard of land whose exact centre formed the intersecting corner boundaries of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire. Taking turns to clamber up the nine foot high structure of Cotswold stone and perch atop the stone ball at the monument’s apex, they would then gleefully proclaim magic to their chums: Look at me! I’m sitting in four different counties at the same time!

A few decades later, medieval scholar and author J.R.R. Tolkien would become as enthralled as Isaac and his chums by the Four Shires Stone, returning with excited inspiration from his discovery of it to a Moreton pub, The Bell Inn, to sip ale and write up notes about the Three-Farthing Stone, the central place in the shire where three of the four farthings met, for his series of books about imaginary gnome-like creatures, the hobbits. The Bell Inn itself inspired, for Tolkien, the Middle Earth’s famous pub named The Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings, while the similarities between Moreton-in-Marsh and Tolkien’s fictitious town of Bree are unmistakable.

Such delights aside, it was not as if Isaac or the other children around town had much free time.

His classroom education began at the local school when he was five. There he learned to read and write. Once his talents in penmanship emerged, Isaac was sent after school and Saturdays to earn small money as a copyist for Moreton solicitor Edwin Tilsley. This silent, solitary labour suited Isaac’s temperament, but offered none of the body-strengthening work that fell to other Moreton boys with more robust tasks as farm hands and labourers’ helpers.

Once he turned twelve, Isaac left school. He now worked full-time as an attorney’s writing clerk in Tilsley’s law office, joining another writing clerk, William Prosser, the nineteen-year-old brother of Edwin Tilsley’s wife. Both youths spent their hours pinned at their writing desks under the supervising eyes of the firm’s thirty-year-old managing clerk, Charles Wright. This arrangement continued for the next four years, with Isaac remaining in his parents’ home to age sixteen.

During his formative years, Isaac’s entire work experience thus entailed writing things out. It was not creative writing, but copying what he saw exactly and recording what he heard word-for-word. His skill resided in precise replication; his art embraced form as the essential handmaid to content. In this era there was no office equipment for typing documents. The first mechanical typewriter would only be invented in 1867, and even then, it would not enter practical office use until the turn of the twentieth century, which was about the time Isaac would finally be laying his pen down. To replicate multiple copies of documents, it was necessary to copy them by hand. Isaac Jelfs became a human replicating machine, one more scribe in history’s long file of monastic monks and office clerks devoting their lifetimes to copying out text.

Had it not been for the Jelfs’s well-founded belief that young men had to make their own way in the world, Isaac’s clerical existence in the small English town of Moreton might have continued, unremarkably, for the rest of his life. But as soon as he turned seventeen, his parents made clear it was his turn to follow his brother Sam out of the family fold. They’d got him this far, still alive, and now it was up to him to take responsibility for his life. Possessing a transportable skill, Isaac climbed aboard the train to Stratford for a new venue, but still to do the only thing he knew — copying out documents in a law office.

Just where he lived in Stratford remains as unclear as whether he was engaged in the law offices of Umber & Snowden, or Hobbes, Slatter & Warwick, or Hunt, Oakes & Oliver. No census report mentions him in Stratford because he lived there between the recording intervals for such information, but his own published account of his life clearly states that this is where he lived and worked during these years, and a much later letter sent to him in Muskoka reinforces this fact. For whichever lawyers Isaac worked during the next three years, he no doubt applied himself diligently, as was his nature, acquiring through instruction and osmosis the dry learning solicitors apply to the affairs of others, simplifying the complex and complicating the simple.

In this era young men did not learn the practical work of lawyering by sitting in classrooms contemplating concepts, but by performing practical tasks under the watchful eye of older lawyers and seasoned law clerks — an apprenticeship system similar to any other trade. Isaac’s clerkship entailed searching land titles at the registry office and assisting in the conveyancing of property. But in the main, his fine handwriting and artistic flare with straight-nib pens only meant more such work kept piling up on his high, slant-top copy desk. There the quill driver stood for hours shifting weight from foot to foot or perching on the front edge of his high stool, writing out authoritative contracts and attractive affidavits, filling in the blanks on pre-printed forms for deeds to property, and crafting wills according to the notes one or other of the solicitors provided him.

For the rest of his life, Isaac would earn his keep and make his mark by the pen: as law clerk, lawyer, calligrapher, newspaperman, clerk to municipal councils, artisan of illuminated addresses, and as the indispensable secretary for fraternal organizations, agricultural societies, and church congregations. His writing for newspapers and books, and his recording of minutes, would preserve for posterity a valuable historical record. His fine penmanship would also serve, for his quarter century as Muskoka’s magistrate, to record the proceedings of all his trials. Had he not left behind that written account, this book’s companion volume, Raw Life: Cameos of 1890s Justice from a Magistrate’s Bench Book, which reproduces the cases he tried in that decade, would not exist.

After tedious hours in a Stratford law office, the faster pace of life outside beckoned the young man. Isaac enjoyed the famous theatre town’s bustling atmosphere.

He sang in the church choir, something he would enjoy doing wherever he lived, beginning in Moreton where his brother played the organ, continuing in Stratford and later in Brooklyn, and through his decades in Muskoka singing in a Methodist choir. Handel’s Messiah was one of his favourites — triumphal music that lifted him as he sang.

Isaac no doubt attended plays and enjoyed music concerts, given the penchant he displayed for theatre and performances at other times in his life. While in Stratford he learned to play several musical instruments, most notably what he dubbed the challenging invention known as the clarinet.

William Shakespeare’s influence, both in phrase and perspective, permeated Stratford and resonated profoundly with Isaac. His formative years in Moreton had included immersion in the works of Shakespeare, the rich literary gift he continued to savour throughout his life. He became well acquainted with the playwright’s remarkable cast of universal characters, quoting their memorable lines at apt moments of conversation and alluding to their attributes in his writing. He stood in solemnity before the house where Shakespeare had been born, a wreck of a place but to him a shrine, thinking it a scandal that such heritage was being lost though disregard and decay. After he left the city, the birthplace would be restored in the 1850s and become a tourism mecca, as it still is today.

That Isaac was a reflective observer of others is clear from both his published writing and his few remaining letters. The way he described peoples’ diverse characteristics reflects a perspective enriched by Shakespeare’s own portrayal of people’s pleasures, chronicles of robust adventures, and interpretations of human turmoil, all of it a study of the dilemmas confronting humans, whether regal personages or society’s smallest players. The indelible imprint of his Stratford and Shakespeare-influenced years would endure throughout Isaac’s life. In Muskoka it can still be seen in his preserved Northern Advocate and Muskoka Herald articles, which are sprinkled with Shakespearian phrases and embossed with the poetic flourishes much savoured in the Victorian age.

Isaac Jelfs liked to see William Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon, and this is how the playwright’s untouched birthplace appeared to him before its 1850s restoration. Isaac quoted apposite lines from Shakespeare all his life. (Copyright of the Francis Frith Collection)

To this point in his life, Isaac, who had been raised to be independent, seemed to display little rebelliousness or even much assertiveness. He was patient, kindly, observant, and somewhat shy. As a result, his life followed the arc set by circumstances of his birth and the plans of others. He relished life and its freedom but was willingly passive, content to take things as they came, a pleasurable but dangerous way to live in a world where others have more particular designs.

3

Calumny in Stratford

Isaac’s law office work was running along just fine until a few months before he turned twenty. Although records shedding light on what

happened next were lost in the 1930s, from what is known it seems a substantial sum of money went missing from an estate his Stratford law firm was administering. When this came to light with the other lawyers, it was alleged by one of them that Isaac was the culprit. He must have felt the blood drain from his face hearing such an allegation. There had to be some awful mistake. If there were problems in the estate, he protested, it was not the result of his wrongdoing, or any money that he had taken.

No doubt the lawyer who accused him would have stressed the delicacy of the situation, because if embezzlement or fraud became known, not only would the reputation of the firm be ruined, but Isaac would go to prison. The lawyers would endeavour to hide the loss and shield the problem until things blew over. The authorities would not be involved because the firm did not want charges laid, which would only bring the shortage of money into the open and make a bad situation worse.

There would, in short, be a cover-up.

Even if Jelfs repaid the money, as the culpable senior lawyer apparently insisted in his effort to frame the young law clerk, the law office could not have someone